It's 1:48am...

... and I don't want to go to sleep. I feel like my work weeks are so laid out for me. Up at 6:15am. On a call at 7. Try to get to work before 7 or soon after. Back to back calls all day - even through lunch. Back home around 6 or sometimes later. Then back online after the kids are in bed - 10pm or later. The weeks like that are flying by. Right past all of summer. So I don't want to go to sleep - because I don't really have to. I need some time to myself and I guess this is it. I really need a decent vacation. But it's just not in the budget. Things were so much nicer when we didn't have a budget.

I can't imagine if I ever did get to go to Duke for my MBA. How would I possibly do that? I don't think you can work 12 hours a day, AND do that program. It's probably a good thing that my division is not supporting me in this. So that leaves me in a job which is pretty interesting, and perhaps some good reward can come from it. But what's next? I will have to play my cards extremely well to avoid a travel job after this project is over (YE09).

I guy I work with expressed some interest in commercial work, and right away, he got sucked into a role in Colorado. He lives in Boston, and will have to travel Mon-Thur each week. His kids are grown so it's not so bad. But is that my future, too? I really need to find some niche areas that are "home based".

I've been listening to Boz Scaggs lately. Not sure why. I think it reminds me of when we first moved to Charlotte and I had no friends and all I had for entertainment was to look for golf balls (we lived on the #8 fairway). I can remember the Lido Shuffle song, and going to 6th grade across town to University Park Elementary, and then going home and looking for golf balls... hoping to exceed the record of prior days. Was 56 my record for one day? Seems like it. Some bad golf on that course.

The diet has floundered. I have started to run a bit more since returning from Manila. After slacking off for just a few weeks, my running times are off by about 2 minutes (24 min vs 22 before), so that is significant. I am surprised how quickly I lost that momentum and gained back a few pounds (back to 242 now). I still am determined to make 225 by 12/25. I will always remember this summer as the time when I ran at nights and listened to podcasts from MBA Podcaster and from Duke and online executive summaries of business books. I really was over the top there for a while... And I'm still encouraged, but certainly I can't be but so excited, with no prospect of going.

Now I'm actually getting sleepy. I really would like to leave my alarm set for 615, just for the pleasure of turning it off and sleeping through. But what will happen is that I will be wide awake at 5:45am and will struggle to get 6 hours sleep tonight. How's that for optimism?